Was that one of the dough balls from the batch that you made about the middle of December 2009 and exposed to periods of defrost and refreezing? If so, the pizza you made looks very good. As we have discussed before, there can be no fermentation of the dough while it is frozen. Once defrosted, the dough starts to ferment again. Refreezing it gradually brings the fermentation to a halt again. I'm sure in your case that it helped that your freezer does not have the typical cycling defrost feature. That is not the best thing for frozen dough and is likely to shorten its useful life.

That was one of the dough balls left over from December 2009. It was exposed to different periods of defrost and refreezing. Thanks for saying it looked good. I was going to throw the dough ball away last week, but figured why not try and see if the dough would still be okay.

I do think since my shed freezer is a manual freezer and not having defrost cycles, that might be why the dough ball survived so long. The freezer is in the candy shed and we used to keep butter, nuts and other items for our caramel corn business. I know from freezing food in kitchen freezer, how fast food can get freezer burn. When I buy extra meat or freeze cheese, I always freeze it in the manual freezer. It stays good in there for a long while, also. The food in the manual freezer isnít exposed to opening or shutting the door as much, either.

I still will chalk this up to the mystery of dough and freezing. Sometime I want to take two dough balls and freeze one in the house freezer and also one in the manual freezer and see what happens. I almost positive that the one in the manual freezer will do better.

Here is a picture of the dough ball at market yesterday, before it thawed. The ice crystals can be seen on the dough.

At one point I did consider using the method with a 00 flour but never got around to doing it, most likely because I ran out of the 00 flour and did not replenish it because the flour doesn't perform as well in my home oven as in a very high temperature oven. Nonetheless, the principles involved should still apply even for the 00 flour. However, that said, 00 flour is unmalted and, as Marco (pizzanapoletana) told us at Reply 125 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1298.msg13410/topicseen.html#msg13410, it has low amylase activity and is not ideal for cold fermentation applications. It still might be worth an experiment, however, to see how the end product performs. Using Toby's baking method would also be interesting.

I don't think the mixer is essential to an extended refrigeration dough. I've made plenty by hand when I've been away from my kitchen and still gotten shelf life. It's just a lot of hand kneading to develop the dough. I think more essential to the long refrigeration is low yeast so the dough won't be overactive during it's sleep. I wouldn't change the recipe except to account for feel. Different flours will demand different hydrations to achieve the same consistency. Otherwise, don't sweat the missing mixer. Just do a good bulk counter rise, ball it, oil it, cold-store it, and if the containers start to bulge after a couple of days, burp them like tupperware. I am a control freak, and I've found a little faith to be an ally in these situations. What's the worst that can happen? (Actually, never ask that question... You don't want an answer!!! )

- GB

ps - Norma, that geriatric dough makes some beautiful pizzas. The color of the crust was very nice and it looked lighter than air. Bet the flavor was amazing. How would you characterize it? Sour?

The doughs that I described in this thread have things in common with Glutenboy's dough but there are some material differences. For example, I used more yeast (but still on the fairly low side) and less salt than Glutenboy (which affects the fermentation process), a higher hydration (which speeds up the fermentation process), and my dough balls were generally larger (from a bit larger to several ounces larger) and perhaps took longer to cool down than Glutenboy's roughly 300-gram dough balls. Also, in my case, in order to get a fairly low finished dough temperature after all of the many steps that I used to make my doughs, I found it necessary to use very cold water. By contrast, my recollection is that Glutenboy uses room temperature water. One of the problems with hand kneading a dough that uses very cold water is that it is harder to hydrate the flour than if room temperature water were to be used. Also, hand kneading takes longer than a machine so the dough has a tendency to warm up toward room temperature, thereby raising the finished dough temperature. To compensate for the warmer water and the fact that you would be hand kneading the dough, I would perhaps lower the yeast quantity. It would also be possible to increase the salt level, perhaps to something like the 2.5% salt level that Glutenboy uses, and to slow down the fermentation in the process, but for taste and other reasons (e.g., keeping sodium levels down), I use around 1.50-1.75% salt.

For now, since Glutenboy has weighed in with his opinion on hand kneading, my advice is to go with his recipe and preparation methods. Once you see how that recipe turns out for you, you can always consider a version of one of the doughs described in this thread.

Thanks for the wealth of information. You hit on everything I could have possibly wanted to know. I'll likely be making this dough a few days before I get my new oven, and I'll be sure to take pictures of the before and after.

Yeah, 248 and forward. No sour after all that time? Hmm. Anyway, the coloration is interesting too. Theoretically you'd used up all the sugars and there shouldn't have been much browning, but it doesn't seem to work out that way. My older doughs also get excellent color.

When doing this experiment the taste of the crust was great, but the dough was so close to over fermenting in my opinion. Don't really know about the coloration, but this was baked in a Baker's Pride deck oven.I will have to give your formula a try someday. I have read about it, but haven't had time to try it.

I made a dough that underwent 23 days of cold fermentation and I did not get "sour" flavors. See Reply 117 in this thread at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,3985.msg42556.html#msg42556. I got some potent and ususual crust flavors (there was some vinegar used in the dough) but not "sour" flavors. As you can see, there was still good crust coloration after 23 days, even with no sugar added to the dough. In earlier doughs, with fermentations up to around 16 days, I could even detect a sweetness in the finished crusts even though there was no sugar added to the doughs. It was all quite unusual.

What type of "tweaking" do you speak of? Sorry, but I'm still new to all of this and trying to learn.

Cayman,

There are a lot of factors that can affect a dough as it is being made. It might be the condition and age of the flour (which can affect its moisture content), room temperature, humidity, water temperature, how accurately ingredients (especially the flour and water) are measured out, the efficiency and effectiveness of the method used to make the dough (e.g., machine versus hand kneading), and so forth. Substituting one flour for another, even if they nominally appear to be the same from a specs standpoint, might also affect the final condition of the dough. So, it might become necessary to make minor adjustments (tweaks) to the amounts of flour and/or water to achieve the desired final dough condition for the particular type of dough being made (e.g., New York style, American style, deep-dish style, cracker style, etc.). These types of adjustments are learned through experience.

I'm going to attempt to make my first pizza from scratch. I like the idea of this thread, but the best flour I have found so far is KA bread flour. I'm curious how you would alter this for use with this flour?

For the New Years Winter Ice Classic, Red Wings vs Hawks, I decided to do a side by side with olive oils. I used Classico, trader Joes extra virgin, and Lucini's (Red November's reccomendation via another thread). I have to say I was quite surprised, as the Lucini's was much chewier, with a near perfect bubbling. The others were good, but not up to the caliper of the Lucini's.

Thanks for the great thread as this method has been a staple for me on my PizzaPro.

Jake

Good grief, who would have thought the brand of olive oil would make a difference. Maybe Jake hit a good year. I have read that a brand of olive oil could be great 1 year and not so great the following year. I guess like vino.

Gees, I don't believe I'm resurrecting this subject considering it was in 2010 since someone last posted. I'm so excited to try Pete's KA model to completion. Going with the 1st recipe posted in # 1. Started last night, I tripled the ingredients and the KA easily handled it and formed 3 balls. I was originally going to try the 1st ball in 48 hours followed the other 2 balls 48 hours apart. But after calming down and let some of the excitement pass, I 'll commence with the 1st ball on day 4, followed by another on day 6 then day 8. Dough seems to have flattened out in its containers after 24 hours. No action/no rise as yet.

I didn't have Pete's C dough hook so went with the spiral hook. Let's see.

Gees, I don't believe I'm resurrecting this subject considering it was in 2010 since someone last posted.

carl333,

Although this thread has been around for a while, it has quietly garnered almost 92,000 page views, and with only 14 pages of posts and, as of this morning, a total of only 274 posts, including this one. I can never quite figure out what attracts readers to this thread, or many others for that matter, but once you start closing in on the six figure mark in posts, there is usually a good reason for its popularity. Maybe it is because the thread tells how to make doughs that can last for days, even weeks, when most are thinking in terms of a day or a few days. So, maybe it is a curiosity factor. Or maybe its technical and scientific nature has appeal to those who like that sort of thing. Or maybe we've exhausted the subject to the point where there is not much more to be said.